One hundred years ago this summer, the eyes of the world turned to the small Tennessee town of Dayton, located about halfway between Chattanooga and Knoxville. The Tennessee legislature had recently passed the Butler Act, forbidding the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The trial of John T. Scopes, a local science teacher, which took place in July 1925, has only the O. J. Simpson trial as a competitor for the moniker “trial of the century.”
But what was it about, really? I contend it should be understood as a quintessentially American episode in the unfolding drama of harmonizing reason and faith. But first let us recall some of the ways in which the case could be framed: the personal, the legal, and the cultural.
The case brought together various personal interests seeking their own ends. It came about as the product of a fishing expedition by the New York-based ACLU, which had advertised around Tennessee looking for a teacher to bring a test case, and a conspiracy concocted by a handful of Dayton’s civic leaders to indict one of its own teachers, as an act of small-town boosterism. The case caught the attention of one of the political giants of the day: William Jennings Bryan, thrice nominated as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, who in retirement had turned to advocating against the Darwinian theory of evolution. For Bryan, the case was an opportunity to defend fundamentalist Christianity and the Bible literally understood as a reasonable basis on which to ground individual and communal life. Meanwhile, the case also caught the attention of the agnostic pugilist and Darwinian lawyer Clarence Darrow, who had made his name in the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder trial, in which he deployed a form of psychological determinism to argue his clients were not genuinely free agents. For Darrow, the case was an opportunity to expose the “imbecility” and “bigotry” of fundamentalism, and defend the rights and prerogatives of enlightened science in the public square and classroom. At some level, then, the case pitted two great men’s egos against one another in a zero-sum contest.
The parties to the case laid out the rival legal frames through which the case could be understood. Bryan and the prosecution framed the legal issue as one of parental rights to direct the education of their children because they delegate their teaching authority to public school teachers and pay their salaries. Known as “the Great Commoner,” and ever the populist, Bryan also framed the issue as one of the right of majority rule to control education in its state against “an insolent minority” trying to force irreligion on America’s youngsters. Meanwhile, Darrow and the defense did not directly challenge the right of parents and the majority but contended that the law amounted to an establishment of religion and violation of individual right to free thought and speech.
The case pitted two great men’s egos against one another in a zero-sum contest.
A number of other cultural frames were apparent as well. One was pro- vs. anti-eugenics. The textbook at issue in the case, Civic Biology by George W. Hunter, taught eugenics as part and parcel of Darwinian evolution and countenanced the eugenicist measures of the day, like forced sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws to prevent the perpetuation of the “unfit.” Hence, Bryan cited the brutality of eugenics as a reason to oppose teaching Darwinian evolution. Another cultural frame was the intra-Christian debate of modernism vs. fundamentalism. Modernist theologians accepted the fundamentals of higher criticism of the Bible as the product of historical and cultural circumstances, and embraced the idea of God as immanent in history and “truth” as an unfolding idea that came with greater progress in the human sciences. On this view, it is a mistake to interpret the various alleged miracles reported in Scripture as literal historical events. Indeed, on the modernist view, one could even question the Virgin Birth and remain an orthodox Christian, as modernist pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick argued. The modernist would affirm Francis Bacon’s adage that men should endeavor an “endless progress” in the study of the book of God’s Word (the Bible) and the book of God’s works (nature). Indeed, Charles Darwin opened up his Origin of Species with this quote from Bacon.
Fundamentalists reacted against modernism, emphasizing the absolute reliability of Scripture as an accurate, literal historical record of miracles and the unchangeability of revealed truths. Accordingly, fundamentalist Protestant theologians like J. Gresham Machen wrote in defense of the fundamentals of traditional Christian faith against theological liberalism and modernism, which he saw as rooted in naturalism, the idea that God does not intervene into the workings of nature.
The Scopes trial took place over the course of about a week, during which the hot Tennessee air became abuzz with unusual sounds like prop planes flying newsreels to cities around the country to play in cinemas the next day, clacking telegraphs sending the trial dispatches of reporters like H. L. Mencken, and even the occasional screech of a stray monkey. The trial ended in the conviction of Scopes, a foregone conclusion. The real drama in the contest was between Bryan and Darrow, climaxing in Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan as an expert witness on the Bible, a courtroom showdown between science and religion.
The meaning of the trial in the popular imagination in subsequent generations was encapsulated and perpetuated by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 play and the 1960 film, Inherit the Wind. Using the Scopes Trial as an anti-McCarthyism metaphor, the Bryan character is portrayed as an aged huckster on a self-aggrandizing crusade, at the head of a band of ignorant yokels whom Mencken had compared to the Huns storming the gates of civilization. The hero is the Darrow character, defender of scientific enlightenment, tolerance, free thought and speech, with a cool and calm rationalist wit. The dramatization of Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan—in which Darrow asked if Jonah were literally swallowed by a whale, if Joshua’s God really stopped the sun for an hour, etc.—was intended to portray Bryan as an unscientific rube. Yet, whatever its merits as a piece of filmmaking in the McCarthyist era, Inherit the Wind is not accurate history, not least because Clarence Darrow was anything but an advocate for “tolerance.” The irony of writing a play about the virtue of tolerance while bashing fundamentalist Christians as unscientific bumpkins seems to have been lost on the writers.
I submit that the trial is better understood as an episode in the drama of harmonizing faith and reason in the American mind. Since the American founding, the American mind has had deeply compatibilist instincts regarding reason and faith. That is, there was a conviction that knowledge derived from unaided reason did not contradict knowledge derived from revelation.
That conviction is deeply Thomistic. Thomas Aquinas famously opposed the Latin Averroists, who cropped up at the University of Paris in the 1260s. Having imbibed Aristotle’s teachings on the eternity of the world and the Muslim commentator Averroes’ (mis)interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of the soul, the Latin Averroists affirmed a “double truth” theory: That there are philosophical truths and revelational truths, even though they may be contraries. Against this idea, Aquinas argued for the unity of the intellect and the unity of truth: Truth is adaequatio intellectus rei, conformity of the intellect with the real, and the real is made known to human beings by both the lights of reason and faith. This means the genuine content of reason can never contradict the genuine content of faith.
It is often forgotten that interlocutors on both sides of the evolution debate in the 1920s saw themselves as defending both faith and reason. This meant the pro-evolution side sought to prove that the science of evolution need not contradict Christian faith, and this meant defending a particular vision of faith. While Darrow was himself a religious skeptic, the defense downplayed this. They emphasized in their arguments that an instructor could in good conscience teach the theory of evolution without contradicting the Bible’s teaching about the divine creation of man. Part of this argument was an admission that there was not agreement on the mechanism of evolution—e.g., whether it was Darwinian random variation and natural selection or perhaps neo-Lamarckian (in the spirit of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) indwelling vital forces that propelled species toward greater complexity. The latter idea was reconcilable with a teleological understanding of nature, created and imbued with purpose by God. Hence, the defense’s first witness, Maynard Metcalf, a practicing Christian in a congregationalist church, sought to suggest that Christian faith was compatible with evolution. In his written testimony, he set forth a conception of reason and faith that was fundamentally Thomistic: “Truth is one, whether scientific truth or religious truth, and it calls for loyalty from every worthy man.”
On the anti-evolution side, part of the argumentative strategy was to cast doubt on the reasonability of evolution, scientifically speaking. Hence, Bryan argued Darwin’s theory of evolution was unsubstantiated by the evidence. One argument Bryan made in this vein was that Darwinian evolution had not been proven on its own terms, in that no species had actually been definitively traced to have arisen from another by evidence from the fossil record. Darwin’s theory entailed that now-extinct intermediate varieties linking species would be “enormous”—but that geology had not yet revealed such a “finely graduated organic chain.” Darwin thought over time the geological record would improve and substantiate his theory.
By the 1920s, more fossils had been found that could fit with Darwinian evolution. But it turned out skepticism of at least some of the evidence proffered wasn’t mere wild-eyed dogmatic prejudice. In 1925, the Piltdown Man find was considered fossil evidence of a linkage between apes and man—a “missing link.” And this find was cited by one of the defense’s expert witnesses in favor of Darwinian evolution. While some evolution skeptics denounced it as a fraud in the moment, it was widely reported as true. It wasn’t until a couple decades later that the Piltdown Man was revealed to be an intentional fraud using a human skull and orangutan teeth.
No amount of fossils or DNA testing can prove man is not a special creation of God, the imago dei, bearing the immaterial powers of reason and will.
By engaging Darwin on the terms he set forth for substantiating evolution, Bryan implicitly acknowledged the power of reason and the scientific method to discover truth. And by engaging with Genesis to interpret it in a non-literalist way that was compatible with evolution, the defense implicitly acknowledged the power of the Bible to reveal truth. In short, both the pro- and anti-evolutionary interlocutors were driven by a conviction of the need for the integrity of reason and science, of faith and the interpretation of Scripture, and their true deliverances being in harmonious aim at truth.
Between the fundamentalists and the modernists of the 1920s, another group was present, which resisted being placed in either camp: the Roman Catholic. Having won a landmark case in the summer of 1925 protecting the right of Catholic parents to send their kids to Catholic parochial schools, this particular battle wasn’t their fight. Still, Catholic journalists covering the trial at the time, like Benedict Elder, offered qualified support for Bryan: “Although as Catholics we do not go quite as far as Mr. Bryan on the Bible, we do want it preserved.”1 Doubtless, Elder rejected the modernist dismissal of miracles like the Virgin Birth. On the other hand, this qualification allowed for the possibility of reading Genesis in non-fundamentalist ways and the development of doctrine—i.e., the possibility that unchanging revealed truths could be more deeply understood by the Church over time. This isn’t surprising, even twenty-five years before Pope Pius XII weighed in with the encyclical Humani Generis. For the Catholic, the Tennessee law proposed an at least potentially false dichotomy. For a sort of proto-evolutionary theory had roots in Augustinian thought such that a Catholic could believe that God used natural processes over eons to bring about speciation, including a particular kind of body that could receive an immortal soul. But an immaterial, immortal soul could not arise from merely material processes—this requires God’s special creation. No amount of fossils or DNA testing can prove man is not a special creation of God, the imago dei, bearing the immaterial powers of reason and will.
A non-naturalist, theistic theory of evolution, which stubbornly adheres to the reality of God as a particularly providential governor of his creation who has and continues to bestow miracles, didn’t fit neatly into either the fundamentalist or modernist camp—but it is a view that continues to be defensible today, from a Catholic perspective. Still, as in the 1920s, theistic evolutionism is not the consensus position of Christians today or even of Catholics—and the drama of harmonizing faith and reason can continue to be interesting and fruitful so long as we keep the old Thomistic faith and reject the heresies of Averroism.
1 Quoted in Ed Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Basic Books, 2020), 124. This essay is indebted more generally to Larson’s account.